Velvet

by Jane Feather

  Gabrielle dutifully examined the pattern. Catherine’s taste tended to the flamboyant, to match her figure, and the frills and furbelows on the morning dress were not Gabrielle’s style at all. However, she made the right noises and promised to take the sarcenet.

  Duty done, she went to her own apartments at the rear of the house, intent on ridding herself of the grime and fatigue of a journey that had continued at a breakneck pace for nearly two days.

  Nathaniel had had the best of it, riding beside the chaise while she and Jake were jolted miserably over the ill-paved roads. The child had required constant attention and resisted all Gabrieile’s attempts to engage his imagination in the journey. The unfamiliar food and the motion of the coach had made him almost as sick as he’d been on the boat, and he’d moaned fretfully whenever he wasn’t asleep. Gabrielle had developed a thundering headache by the afternoon of the first day, and Nathaniel, after one look at her drawn face and heavy eyes, had taken Jake up in front of him for a few hours while she slept.

  Judging by Nathaniel’s tight-lipped relief when he returned the child to the chaise, the arrangement had been less than a success. Jake had whimpered constantly for home, for Nurse and Primmy, for Neddy, for milk and for bread without crusts. His small bladder had required frequent relief, and every attempt his father had made to entertain him had fallen on stony ground.

  Nathaniel had handed him back to Gabrielle with the terse comment that it was now his turn to nurse a headache.

  However, by the time they reached the outskirts of Paris and clattered through the narrow cobbled streets, Jake had perked up. He’d never been in a city before, and his eyes had grown wide at the sights and the noises and the varied smells. He forgot his nausea, subjecting Gabrielle to a flood of questions that in her fatigue she found almost as exhausting as his earlier complaints.

  Gabrielle lay back in the hip bath before the fire and closed her eyes on an exhalation of pure joy as her aching limbs relaxed in the warmth. What were Nathaniel and Jake doing at this moment? It was a safe bet they weren’t luxuriating in hot water before a blazing fire.

  Nathaniel had directed the chaise to the flower market on the íle de la Cité in the shadow of Notre Dame. There he’d dismounted and lifted Jake from the carriage.

  “Here we say good-bye.”

  “But where are you going?” Gabrielle hadn’t expected to part so abruptly in this bustle.

  “You’ll be contacted,” he said. “At rue d’Anjou.”

  “But when?”

  “When the time is right.” His response had been implacable and his eyes were already roving the marketplace, assessing, speculating, on the watch. Gabrielle recognized what was happening. She knew what it was like.

  “Very well,” she said calmly, and then leaned out of the window, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Jake, you’re going on a big adventure with Papa. You have to be his helper and not say anything unless he says you can. No one must know anything about us, where we come from, or anything at all. It’s a big secret and it’s our secret. All right?”

  Jake, perched on his father’s hip, gazed at her, his eyes wide. He’d become accustomed to the fact that Gabby and his father spoke to each other only in French on this journey. He didn’t understand what they said to each other, but he could always tell the mood they were in, and now that the strangeness of this journey was wearing off, he was beginning to regain his equable nature.

  “Where are you going?”

  “That’s a secret too,” she said.

  Jake thought about this, then he nodded. “We’ll pretend we’re invisible and no one can see us, an’ we can walk down the street and no one knows us, an’ we can watch them and listen to them and they can’t hear us.”

  “Except when you and Papa are alone,” Gabrielle said.

  Jake’s eyes shone. “Then we can talk like ordinary. When no one’s listening.”

  “Exactly.”

  “We have to go,” Nathaniel said, his voice curt with anxiety. He held Jake closer to the window so Gabrielle could kiss him good-bye. Then he turned and strode off through the crowded marketplace, and was soon lost to view.

  The post boy, already instructed, had mounted the riding horse and they’d continued to rue d’Anjou, where Gabrielle had paid off the coachman and the post boy, who’d conveyed them from the changing post at Neuilly into Paris.

  And how long was she to wait here, lapped in luxury, before Nathaniel made contact? Jake’s presence obviously meant an end to whatever spying plans Nathaniel had had … something to do with an agent in Toulouse, he’d said. Would he expect her to work alone in that case?

  In the dark back room of a small stone house on rue Budé on the Île St. Louis, three men sat around a table where the stains of old wine were so ingrained as to give the oak a rich patina. Tallow candles cast a dim light over the remnants of a meal of garlic sausage and ripe cheese.

  Jake idly picked up bread crumbs from the table with a moistened forefinger and yawned. He was bored. It had been exciting when they’d first arrived at this funny dark house. There were lots of children who’d stared at him and nudged each other and whispered among themselves. One of them had thrust a piece of cake at him, and they’d all giggled when he’d taken a big bite. He’d wanted to play with them, but Papa had said he couldn’t today and had hurried him upstairs to a small room under the eaves.

  Now the adventure seemed to have lost its novelty. Papa had given him some bread and some of that horrible greasy sausage, but he wasn’t hungry enough to eat it. He’d really like some more cake, and milk from the brown cows on the home farm in his china mug with the rabbits on it.

  Papa and the two men were speaking French in low voices, and the room smelled of tallow and garlic and ancient damp stone. It was warmed by a charcoal brazier, but it was a stuffy, airless warmth that made Jake even sleepier. He folded his arms on the table and rested his head on his forearms, closing his eyes.

  Nathaniel gave him a distracted glance, a worried frown corrugating his brow. The child should be in bed, but the bed he would share with his father was at the far end of a warren of passages that wound its way through the row of stone houses lining the narrow medieval street. Jake couldn’t be left alone there, but he looked wretchedly uncomfortable where he was.

  He pushed back his chair and stood up, scooping the child into his arms. Jake’s eyes opened in startlement, then closed again as his father sat down, settling him into his lap. He pushed his thumb into his mouth and sighed like an exhausted puppy as his body went limp in sleep. Nathaniel, vaguely feeling he should, tried to remove the thumb but gave up as the sleeping child fiercely resisted.

  “Poor little devil,” one of the two men observed with some sympathy. “He’s tired out.”

  “Yes,” Nathaniel agreed shortly, and returned brusquely to the original topic. “One of you will have to go to Toulouse and see what the hell’s going on with Seven. I haven’t heard from him in weeks. If he’d been captured, we’d have discovered by now, so someone had better track him down. I’d intended to go myself, with the woman, but in the circumstances …”

  “I’ll go.”

  “Thanks, Lucas.” Nathaniel nodded at the fiercely bearded man at the end of the table. Careful not to disturb the sleeping child, he refilled his glass and pushed the wine bottle across.

  “So, how are you going to use the woman?” The second man took a deep gulp from his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m not too keen on meeting a double agent, myself.” He grinned, showing a mouth from which two front teeth were missing.

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll keep her well away from you.” Nathaniel sipped his wine and cut a slice of sausage. “We’ll establish a channel of communication and you will feed her what we believe she needs to know. I want to flush out their people in England. She’ll be told of a meeting to take place with our key agents there. It’s to be presumed Fouché won’t pass up the opportunity to infiltrate … send
an observer or two. We’ll scoop ’em up.”

  “And presumably, whatever information she provides us with is suspect.”

  “Of course. You’ll act on nothing without consultation.”

  “D’accord.” The two men drained their glasses and rose. “You will stay with the Farmiers?”

  “For the moment. It provides cover for the child. One more brat among their brood isn’t going to draw much notice.”

  Nathaniel remained at the table as his companions wrapped themselves in cloaks and mufflers and slipped out into the bitter night. The candle flared under a gust of wind as the door closed. Jake stirred and mumbled something.

  Nathaniel stood up carefully and extinguished all but one of the tallow candles. He hitched the child up against his shoulder and took the last candle, leaving the room. In the narrow passage outside he pressed a stone in the rough-hewn wall and a slab eased back. He stepped through into another room just like the one he’d left at the back of the neighboring house. He progressed in this manner halfway along rue Budé until he entered a room where a narrow bedstead stood against the far wall and a rickety dresser leaned askew against the wall beneath a tiny shuttered window overlooking the narrow street at the back of the house.

  It was the house of one Monsieur Farmier, a baker with a large and ever-increasing family who had a nose for an easy profit and a blind eye when it came to the clandestine comings and goings of his various lodgers. They were quiet, unassuming men in laborer’s clothes who spoke his own language with perfect fluency and paid handsomely and regularly. He asked no questions and was vouchsafed no information. In the event of a raid, he would have only descriptions to offer Monsieur Fouché’s policemen.

  Madame Farmier, hugely pregnant, had fussed over Jake, and Nathaniel intended that once Jake had recovered from the journey and was accustomed to the strangeness of this new existence, he would be absorbed into her unruly brood. No observer would notice one extra child running with the Farmiers.

  Nathaniel pulled off Jake’s shoes, his coat and britches, and tucked him into the cot in his underclothes. Jake flung his arms wide in an expansive gesture. Nathaniel grimaced. It was surprising how much space a six-year-old could take up. He edged into bed beside the child’s warm body, rearranging Jake’s limbs so that he occupied rather less of the narrow area. However, it was with no great confidence in a good night’s sleep that the spymaster composed himself for rest.

  18

  A lad brought a message to rue d’Anjou the following afternoon. He was a grimy urchin with his cap set crookedly on his unruly thatch of dirt-darkened hair. The footman surveyed him with a raised eyebrow and instructed him to go to the kitchen entrance.

  The urchin sniffed and shook his head, thrusting a sealed envelope at the footman before he scampered back down the steps to the street.

  The footman glanced at the envelope as if it were something nasty that had crawled out of the woodwork. However, it was clearly addressed in literate handwriting to the Comtesse de Beaucaire.

  Gabrielle was sitting with Catherine in a sunny upstairs parlor when the message arrived on a silver salver. She recognized the writing immediately, and her heart jumped against her ribs, her stomach jolting with anticipation.

  “Excuse me, Catherine.” She smiled vaguely at her companion and left the parlor.

  In her own room she tore open the envelope. The message, in the code she and Nathaniel had worked out together at Burley Manor, was similar in content to many she had received from Guillaume. She was given a channel of communication: the flower seller in the flower market whose stall was to the left of the center pump. She would be selling bunches of primroses. Gabrielle was to buy a bunch and with the three-sou payment she could pass on a written message using this same code.

  There was nothing personal in the message, no greeting and no signature, only the handwriting to identify the sender. But that was only to be expected.

  Gabrielle paced her bedroom, frowning. Nathaniel intended to keep his whereabouts secret from her. Why?

  She could understand that he’d be extra cautious with Jake, but she needed to know where he was. For some reason, the idea of him somewhere in Paris, unreachable except through the medium of the flower seller, made her dreadfully uneasy.

  Well, she’d just have to find out for herself where he was. She sat at the seaétaire to compose a missive to the spymaster. Unfortunately she couldn’t think of anything utterly compelling to tell him. She settled for the simple information that Talleyrand had returned from Prussia and was likely to be in residence in Paris for some weeks.

  Slipping the sealed envelope into her reticule, she left the house, hailed a passing hackney, and drove to the flower market. It was as busy as it had been the previous day, the air moist and heavy with the scents of flowers, the cobblestones damp from the continual dousing the merchandise received from prudent sellers.

  An old crone in black widow’s weeds sat at the stall to the left of the central pump. She gave Gabrielle an incurious glance as she selected a bunch of primroses for her and held out a hand cruelly gnarled with arthritis for the three sous.

  She took the envelope and the money without a flicker in the dull eyes, and Gabrielle moved away, holding the primroses to her nose, inhaling their spring scent.

  She took up a position beside a striped awning across from the primrose seller and waited. After a few minutes she saw a small boy run out from behind a cart and approach the crone. The lad grabbed the envelope and darted off through the throng toward the bridge that connected the small Île St. Louis to its larger cousin, the Île de la Cité.

  Gabrielle hurried after him. She couldn’t run without drawing attention to herself, but her long-legged stride kept the boy in sight as he raced along the Quai d’Orléans and disappeared round the corner of the rue Budé.

  She stood at the end of the street, hidden in a doorway, inhaling the cold air that smelled of garbage and damp stone and mud from the Seine flowing sluggishly around the island. The lad stopped at number thirteen. She couldn’t see who opened the door, but in a few seconds the lad was running back up the street. He went past her without seeing her, and Gabrielle walked briskly down the street, glancing casually at the door to number thirteen before making her way along rue St. Louis en l’Île, back to the flower market. At least she knew where Nathaniel and Jake were now. Not that it did her much good.

  Nathaniel swore vigorously as he looked at the letter Monsieur Farmier had brought upstairs. He’d instructed the baker to tell the flower seller to deliver any communications to Gerard’s bar on the quay, where he’d arrange to have them collected. Farmier had obviously forgotten that instruction; presumably his brain had been fuddled with his midday tippling.

  Gabrielle would have followed the lad. It was what he would have done in her circumstances, and she was always resourceful.

  He went out into the street. There was no sign of a tall, black-clad redhead. But then, he wouldn’t expect her to reveal herself either.

  She wouldn’t deliberately bring Fouché’s men down upon him, not when he had Jake with him, but it was all damnably uncertain. And he couldn’t afford uncertainty—not with Jake. He went back into the house and upstairs to his garret room. Perhaps he should change the safe house. Gabrielle could continue to believe he was still there and send her messages. But it was such perfect cover for the child.

  Footsteps pounded on the stairs outside and the door burst open. “Papa—”

  “It’s polite to knock on a door before entering,” Nathaniel said, regarding his son with a degree of irritation at this explosive interruption.

  Jake fixed his eyes on his shuffling feet, and he became again the timid child of Burley Manor.

  “What is it you want?” Nathaniel asked less sharply, catching the child’s chin and turning it up. “What’s that all around your mouth?”

  “Toffee,” Jake said, rubbing with the back of his hand. “It’s sticky.”

  “Yes, I can see that.
Come here.” He drew the child to the dresser, dipped a cloth in water, and scrubbed vigorously.

  “There’s rabbits in the yard,” Jake said, snuffling through the washcloth. “In a cage. Can I go an’ see them? Henri has to feed ’em.”

  “How do you talk to Henri?” Nathaniel turned Jake’s face side to side, examining it for any residue of toffee. “He doesn’t speak English.”

  Jake looked confused by the question.

  “I suppose actions speak louder than words,” Nathaniel observed.

  Jake didn’t understand this either, but he could feel that his father’s annoyance had disappeared. “So can I go, Papa?” He hopped anxiously from foot to foot.

  “May I?” Nathaniel corrected the child automatically.

  “May I?” Jake repeated with ill-concealed impatience. “It’s only in the yard outside the kitchen door.”

  “I suppose so, but …” Nathaniel was left speaking to empty air, the sound of Jake’s feet receding on the stairs.

  Nathaniel smiled as he hoped that the child wouldn’t associate furry bunnies with his dinner tomorrow. And suddenly he was swamped with longing to see Gabrielle, to share that thought with her, to hear her rich chuckle. He found himself wishing that if she had followed the lad, she’d have thrown caution to the wind and paid him one of her indiscreet visits.

  But such thoughts were dangerous madness.

  “So, you believe you have gained the English spymaster’s confidence, madame?” Fouché rolled an unlit cigar between his stubby fingers and regarded Gabrielle through hooded eyes.

  “He has agreed to take me into his service,” she responded calmly, leaning back in her chair in Talleyrand’s office.

  “And how did you travel back to France?”